As a white guy I can often get away without worrying about racism. But then I’ll get on the phone with my step mother. As a proud black woman, she takes the Obama hatred personally. “They wouldn’t be so vicious except he’s black.”
I know enough about my country to agree. This is a racist country. We have elected a black man, but we’re in that awkward transitional phase where we feel like we’re over the worst of it but we still have racism that gets diluted year after year. Not sure if that is true or not . . . but like I said, the white majority manages not to think too often about racism.
She contrasts this to McCain in 2008 gently prying himself away from more blatant racism from some of his supporters:
The earlier video makes me squirm all the more … I wish McCain had said that Arabs are decent people too … but you can tell that his top priority is to back away from the crazy. McCain isn’t going to revel in the easy hatred of his opponent. “Obama is a decent man. You do not have to live in fear of Obama being president!”
And, I’m totally cool with a sense of humor, but us white guys, especially anyone running for public office, know there are things you just don’t joke about, especially not in front of the TV cameras. Of course nobody asks about our birth certificate. Nobody asks where we are from. That never happens. Its preposterous! Because white == American == white! Everyone knows this! The only reason an intelligent person like Mitt would crack a joke about his birth certificate to a crowd of supporters is as a nod to his “birther” supporters.
And you know why there’s a birther movement who absolutely can not believe that the president of the United States, Barack Hussein Obama, is a native-born citizen of the United States? I’ll give you a hint. Some coded, off-color humor:
Nobody asks for Romney’s birth certificate because he’s not a n*gger.
That’s the plain and simple truth, and when Romney deliberately brings it up he is race-baiting his audience.
Angela takes is more personally than I do … she is quicker to speak up. But even if the casual coded racism doesn’t bother you, what is all the more disappointing about Mitt Romney is that he is so desperate to pander to an audience that he will even pander to racism. John McCain had some character and integrity. The same has not been demonstrated by Mitt Romney.
So, we have yet-another-shooting, which usually provokes a mention on the potential wisdom of gun control and some NRA vitriol about how what we need isn’t less guns but more guns. But then, the latest incident involved kevlar body armor and a gas mask. Guns wouldn’t have been quite as useful in stopping this guy.
I have a more practical solution for the NRA to advocate. Instead of arguing that more people should carry unregulated firearms, instead create a world in which the populace is universally armed. In every pubic place we install explosive devices capable of maiming an armored human being. Then, you put a sign on each device explaining what number to text to trigger an explosion.
Improvised Explosive Devices have proved invaluable to the Iraqi population in their struggle against a well-armored occupying army. And, frankly, learning to handle firearms and having to drag them around everywhere in case a crazy person starts shooting and keeping up your aim so you can get a clean headshot . . . that’s so 19th Century Old West. We can solve our modern problems with modern technology, and put the ability to defend oneself with lethal force in the hands of anyone who can obtain a simple mobile phone.
Many well-meaning people counter that the BSA is a private organization, and as such should be able to keep whomever they want out. This is of course the same justification used to prevent minorities from eating in restaurants during the Jim Crow years. And where an organization as revered and national in scope as the Scouts maintains and defends such a policy, it sends the wrong message to our youth, many of whom already are struggling with their own sexual identity–an identity which has nothing whatsoever to do with their “morality,†but everything to do with their self-esteem and happiness. Thus, while the BSA may have the “legal†right to continue to discriminate–a question I believe should be revisited–I and others have the same “legal†right to protest the policy, till our last breaths if necessary, as blatantly discriminatory and against everything that equality in America stands for.
The dinosaurs running the national organization at the Boy Scouts of America need to stop practicing discrimination. Acceptance of people without regard to sexual orientation is the Morally Straight approach.
I have been aware of the prison problem for a decade or so. What strikes me here is that every year we have the same number of people released from prison as receive Bachelor’s degrees. We funnel this money to corporations who are always happy to lobby for more money, when we should be putting the cash into schools, who are always protesting about their budget cuts.
Once upon an unemployed time I was soul-searching, and I figured that our biggest, most solvable problem was the rate of incarceration. How could I help to solve that? Well, if we started letting folks out, they would need jobs . . . jobs with a prison record and poor educational background. People need to help improve literacy in the prisons.
But I wasn’t bold enough to follow up. And when I am working I don’t worry so much about finding mission to make the world better.
A paragraph I had highlighted as I finished my reading of Du Bois’ “Dusk of Dawn”:
The Dyer Anti-lynching Bill went through the House of Representatives and on to the floor of the Senate. There in 1924 it died with a filibuster and the abject surrender of its friends. It was not until years after that I knew what killed that anti-lynching bill. It was a bargain between the South and the West. By this bargain, lynching was let to go on uncurbed by Federal law, on condition that the Japanese be excluded from the United States.
Sometimes Divide and Conquer needs some unity of purpose to succeed. All too often, we have made compromises to accommodate critically-needed constituencies, and it takes us far too long to realize the evil in the deals we have made, and far too long to correct it. These days I feel that efforts to reduce carbon emissions for the sake of a stable climate are for our generation what race and gender equality, voting rights, workers rights, national infrastructure and slavery were for previous generations.
Marriage says to a child: The man and the woman whose sexual union made you will also be there to love and raise you. In this sense, marriage is a gift that society bestows on its children.
At the level of first principles, gay marriage effaces that gift.
[ . . . ]
But there are more good things under heaven than these beliefs. For me, the most important is the equal dignity of homosexual love. I don’t believe that opposite-sex and same-sex relationships are the same, but I do believe, with growing numbers of Americans, that the time for denigrating or stigmatizing same-sex relationships is over. Whatever one’s definition of marriage, legally recognizing gay and lesbian couples and their children is a victory for basic fairness.
I think that there is more to marriage than children, and that those children who can not be adequately cared for by their birth parents are still entitled to be cared for by whatever competent and loving parents society can find for them. At any rate, I am glad to see a Prop 8 supporter come out of the closet and realize that the way to strengthen marriage is to focus on strengthening marriages, rather than denigrating homosexuals.
The other day they were talking about Aung San Suu Kyi on the radio, that the path she chose to follow was the path laid forth by Mahatma Gandhi and Dr Martin Luther King. The idea is not to seek victory over the enemy, but to identify the universal capacity for virtue, to love the enemy and change the enemy’s heart, to be open to a more enlightened and equitable path. I feel that David Blankenhorn’s evolution here, along with the evolution of many Americans, is evidence that this sort of spiritual warfare is carrying the day in my country.
Someone for whom I have a decent respect is winding down his reading of Atlas Shrugged. While I haven’t read Ayn Rand, I basically get that her shtick is that “self-centered material greed is good because it maximizes economic efficiency. If you waver from this conclusion you are a Communist.”
A comment I left on Facebook:
“Rewarding people who work hard to build wealth” is a key argument for those who desire to rationalize ever-greater disparity in the material welfare of the wealthy over the poor.
“Rewarding people who work hard” is a core objective of Communism.
“A regulatory system that provides fair governance and an incentive for economic efficiency through competition in order to realize the greatest material benefit for society as a whole” is pretty much the desired end of free market capitalism. That’s got three parts: fair regulation, competition, and social good.
Objectivism, like Communism, is like saying “I hate it when a stool has three legs. Things would be better off if the stool had only one leg.”
I likes me some free market economics but it seems like many in our nation have this religious devotion to the idea that everything would be better if there were minimal governance and if we stopped fretting over social welfare. Fortunately there seems to be a counter-argument being put forth, at last, which explains that “wealthy people don’t create jobs unless they have so much consumer demand that they have no choice but to hire more folks” and that “wealthy people are wealthy in large part because the government has built an economy in which there is sufficient infrastructure and a sufficiently educated work force for economic activity to be conducted profitably, and a legal and enforcement structure which removes uncertainty over what rules there are how whether they will be followed.”
If you want to be a Libertarian, I would argue that Somalia is a Libertarian Paradise. There is no government! Strictly speaking, its Anarchy, and whenever I’ve tried to get a Libertarian to explain what parts of government are absolutely necessary the answer has always come out to “only those parts I need to get what I think I want.”
Anyway, I think that if the government can reasonably afford to do so, it ought to, among other things, provide a floor of basic material welfare for its people. And in the interests of promoting a vigorous market system, the government should make an effort to educate its citizens, provide clear and rational regulations and enforcement of economic activity, and if we can ever figure it out, get to a state of Keynesian regulation where we put more capital into the economy when it is weak, and replenish government coffers in times of abundance. All of that effort is rarely efficient and there are lots of opportunities for unfairness and injustice. The government isn’t perfect but it is what we’ve got. The nice thing about Democracy is that we put a value on transparency and fixing of government problems . . .
. . . I’ll take a modern welfare state over Somalia any day of the week!
I haven’t done any research, but I figured I would put in a vote for the cigarette tax, as well as local school bonds for asbestos removal. At current interest rates, government borrowing just sounds like an obvious thing to do.
I also got to vote for Obama for the Democratic Presidential Primary. His was the only name on my registered-Democrat ballot.
I am also hoping that the Cheeseheads give Governor Walker the boot.
Anyway, since Patrick White saw fit to publish his name, face, and contact information alongside a racist cartoon in a newspaper, I dropped him a line suggesting that something might be amiss, and he wrote back saying that no, he was proud to stand by his cartoon, so I shared my own feelings with him:
It is good to cheer on your sports team, but I suspect that if the sports team mascot when you were growing up had been a buck-toothed, squint-eyed Chinaman in a big peasant hat, that you might think twice about printing a Chinaman cartoon in the newspaper. If you were to have such respect for Chinese people and culture, perhaps Indians merit the same sort of respect.
When I was younger my school had an Indian Chief for a mascot. The dozens of our Native American students found it upsetting and it took a few decades of protesting before it was finally removed. While one side found it upsetting that their culture was caricatured to cheer on a sports team, fans of The Chief took offense that Liberal Elites wanted to destroy their culture by imposing Political Correctness on their Hallowed Tradition. So, you had folks insisting that they had to insult another culture in order to properly honor their own culture.
Anyway, some years after I graduated, The Chief got to retire. Alumni kept contributing money and people kept cheering on their team as they had before. Nothing positive was lost, and our school has since regained some respect it had lost during its years of overt racism.
You can make fun of me and rationalize printing racially offensive cartoons in the newspaper all you like, but somewhere deep down, you know it is not right, and you know that you are offending people and scaring away potential clients. Most people are too polite to raise a fuss. But this topic means something to me, so I thought I’d drop you a line and encourage you to think things through.
I don’t need to change Pat White’s mind, and I surely don’t need him to manage my wealth. On the whole, the world seems to be taking a step or two forward for each step back. But it sure is weird to see a racist cartoon published in a newspaper is 2012, 40 years after Stanford managed to figure out that American Indians deserve a little more respect.
Or, if that video isn’t available, just Google “UC Davis Pepper Spray”
You want to know why your fellow Americans are in the streets? You want to know what their message is? The message is that the power and the money are in the hands of fewer people, and that these folks at the top feel entitled to grab more and more and stomp on anyone who gets in their way. Getting angry over numbers is a little difficult, so this cop decided to illustrate the core problem by simply spraying peaceably assembled young people in the head.
The Occupy movement is giving voice to our collective anger. It is an anger we too often stifle for the sake of getting along in our own lives, but most of us know that things have gotten out of whack and this country needs to correct the way it manages things. Oh, but you say you want a fully-formed political agenda? I don’t have one. Nobody does and nobody should. Its called Democracy. But here are a few things, off the top of my head, that we could do:
Raise taxes on the rich. The top marginal tax rate has been as high as 90% and our nation somehow survived.
Simplify the tax code. Capital gains is income. No more deductions. As an upper-income American seeking to buy an expensive house, I say get rid of the damn mortgage interest deduction. It only benefits a minority of upper-income Americans who buy expensive homes. Children need a good education more than I need to save a few bucks on an expensive house.
Stock transaction tax. There are people who make money simply by looking at the squiggly lines in the market and making intelligent bets where those squiggly lines will go. The purpose of the stock exchange is to efficiently allocate capital to companies who will use it to invest in our economy. Betting money on squiggly lines is a distraction.
If corporations are people, and a corporation commits a capital offense, the corporation is to be executed. All of its assets will be seized and sold and the money goes to the victims as restitution.
Equity compensation to executives doesn’t even begin to vest until about three years after its awarded. Don’t fudge the numbers to make the numbers work for the quarter, manage the business for long-term success!
I’m sure you have got an idea or two that may be worth talking about as well. Let us talk about these ideas. Let us promote these ideas. Heck, maybe we could even pass some of these ideas in to law. And let us give thanks to the radicals out there who by provoking Power provoke the anger within each of us.
UPDATE:studentactivism.net has an excellent summary of the events and their aftermath, and excrementalvirtue.com has good commentary regarding the above video, which if you can stand to watch through the first six minutes, you then see the angry student protesters calmly invite the cops to leave: “You can go! You can go!” Although one guy is waving tear gas canisters in the air, the cops huddle and back-step away. (Some of the cops have very clear body language that they do not want to be there.) “Whose quad? Our quad,” the students cheer upon the retreat of the police force. The eight-minute video is a beautiful illustration that starts with an abuse of false authority which rapidly gives way to a retreat by the abusers as the people proudly and non-violently secure their right of peaceful assembly.
These Davis students deserve an A for demonstrating how non-violent resistance can overcome oppression.
At the beginning of our current economic crisis, I embarked on an infrastructure project to make needed improvements to my existing jaw line, and to stimulate the economy through orthodontic stimulus spending. This spending was completely paid for by my personal revenues, and did not contribute to any deficit spending on my part. At least three orthodontic professionals, one oral surgeon, one x-ray technician, and countless support staff received their paychecks as a result of this infrastructure program.
This morning, we took the scaffolding off to unveil my new and improved smile.
The economy could use a little more stimulating, though. With any luck I can make a contribution to consumer confidence by smiling at people.
House Republicans could have kept the debt ceiling issue wholly separate from the budget cut issue.
Instead, Republicans put the gun on the table. They raised the menace of deliberate default in a way it has not been raised before.
Then, having issued the threat, they discovered that their own core supporters would not allow the gun to be holstered again.
They issued demands they knew could not be met, for budget cuts much bigger than Republicans ever enacted when they had the power to enact them. They cocked the weapon. And now here we are: the demands are unmet and Republicans find themselves facing a horrible choice between yielding on their exorbitant demands or pushing the United States into financial upheaval.
David Frum was a speechwriter for President George W Bush.
Some article in The Atlantic about how President Obama has decided to stop being the reasonable guy who makes every last concession imaginable and then some and as of last night is now playing Chicken with the Republicans, daring them to screw the country over, since they’re likely to take the greater share of the blame. Yeah, anyway, this part got me laughing:
There’s an old Soviet joke that a friend once told me. An old man has been standing in line for bread for eight hours. His feet hurt, his back hurts, and he is faint from hunger. Finally, finally the door opens and the baker comes out. He starts to salivate. He fingers the rubles in his pocket.
“Comrades, go home,” says the baker. “There is no flour to make bread today.”
Something in the old man snaps. He has been waiting in these lines for decades, and he has had enough. “This is ridiculous!” he shouts. “I fought in the Great Patriotic War! I worked for forty years in the factory! Now you make me wait in line for eight hours when there’s no flour? You didn’t know this eight hours ago? I spit on you, and I spit on the regime!” And he spits in front of the baker.
A man steps out of line behind him. “Careful, comrade. You know how it would have been in the old days if you had said these things.” With his thumb and forefinger, he mimes a gun being fired at the temple.
Defeated, the man steps out of line and trudges home with everyone else. He goes into his apartment and sits down at the table. His wife walks in just as he pours the last of his vodka into a glass, and drinks it down in one gulp.
“Sergei, what’s wrong?!” she cries, seeing the look on his face. “Don’t tell me they’re out of bread!”
“It’s worse than that. Much worse.” he says heavily.
“What could be worse?”
“They’re out of bullets.”
Americans should maybe be stocking up on their dark humor.
